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Excerpt: Thrall

January 01, 201012:00 AM ET

ElegyFor my father

I think by now the river must be thick with salmon. Late August, I imagine it

as it was that morning: drizzle needling the surface, mist at the banks like a net

settling around us—everything damp and shining. That morning, awkward

and heavy in our hip waders, we stalked into the current and found our places—

you upstream a few yards and out far deeper. You must remember how

the river seeped in over your boots and you grew heavier with that defeat.

All day I kept turning to watch you, how first you mimed our guide's casting

then cast your invisible line, slicing the sky between us; and later, rod in hand, how

you tried—again and again—to find that perfect arc, flight of an insect

skimming the river's surface. Perhaps you recall I cast my line and reeled in

two small trout we could not keep. Because I had to release them, I confess,

I thought about the past—working the hooks loose, the fish writhing

in my hands, each one slipping away before I could let go. I can tell you now

that I tried to take it all in, record it for an elegy I'd write—one day—

when the time came. Your daughter, I was that ruthless. What does it matter

if I tell you I learned to be? You kept casting your line, and when it did not come back

empty, it was tangled with mine. Some nights, dreaming, I step again into the small boat

that carried us out and watch the bank receding— my back to where I know we are headed.

Kitchen Maid with Supper at Emmaus;or, The Mulata

After the painting by Diego Velàzquez, c. 1619She is the vessels on the table before her:the copper pot tipped toward us, the white pitcherclutched in her hand, the black one edged in redand upside down. Bent over, she is the mortarand the pestle at rest in the mortar—still angledin its posture of use. She is the stack of bowlsand the bulb of garlic beside it, the basket hungby a nail on the wall and the white cloth bundledin it, the rag in the foreground recalling her hand.She's the stain on the wall the size of her shadow—the color of blood, the shape of a thumb. She is echoof Jesus at table, framed in the scene behind her:his white corona, her white cap. Listening, she leansinto what she knows. Light falls on half her face.

Mano Prieta

The green drapery is like a sheet of water behind us—a cascade in the backdropof the photograph, a rushing current

that would scatter us, carry us each away. This is 1969 and I am three—still light enough to be nearly the color

of my father. His armchair is a throne and I am leaning into him, proppedagainst his knees—his hand draped

across my shoulder. On the chair's arm my mother looms above me,perched at the edge as though

she would fall off. The camera records her single gesture. Perhaps to still me,she presses my arm with a forefinger,

makes visible a hypothesis of blood, its empire of words: the imprinton my body of her lovely dark hand.

Mythology

1. NOSTOSHere is the dark nightof childhood—flickering

lamplight, odd shadowson the walls—giant and flame

projected through the clearframe of my father's voice.

Here is the past come backas metaphor: my father, as if

to ease me into sleep, recitingthe trials of Odysseus. Always

he begins with the Cyclops,light at the cave's mouth

bright as knowledge, the pilgrimhoning a pencil-sharp stake.

2. QUESTIONS POSED BY THE DREAMIt's the old place on Jefferson StreetI've entered, a girl again, the house darkand everyone sleeping—so quiet it seems

I'm alone. What can this mean now, morethan thirty years gone, to find myselfat the beginning of that long hallway

knowing, as I did then, what standsat the other end? And why does the pastcome back like this: looming, a human figure

formed—as if it had risen from the Gulf—of the crushed shells that pavedour driveway, a sharp-edged creature

that could be conjured only by longing?Why is it here blocking the dark passageto my father's bookshelves, his many books?